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Star Trek Moves into WoW Territory With New Online Game

The Star Trek fan's equivalent of World of Warcraft is now playable thanks to an open beta test — and you don't even have to spend $60 to buy the game as long as you can put up with a few bugs.

While Star Trek had become a struggling franchise in recent years, the blockbuster movie reboot from J.J. Abrams that hit last May renewed interest online and elsewhere.

Right now the easiest way to get a key to play Star Trek Online is to sign up for an account at gamer download mecca FilePlanet, but more choices will come.

Virtual worlds of one kind or another have always been part of Mashable's territory, but positive news on that subject has been slowly drying up. Maybe Second Life didn't turn out to be the revolution a lot of people hoped it would be, but that alternate reality social life is still going strong in the video gaming world.

Games like this are hardly mainstream, though. World of Warcraft's creators brag that the game has 11.5 million subscribers, but quite a few of those gamers primarily play in Asian Internet cafes, which are a whole different world.

It's true that there's a chance Star Trek is now a big enough franchise to push social gaming in a persistent, virtual world into the limelight; interest is only going to grow with the recent announcement that a sequel is coming in the summer of 2012. But the problem is that this Star Trek Online game is actually based mostly on material from the '90s TV series, not the new movie. It's also PC-only software (most mainstream folks play on the web or on game consoles), so its niche is obvious: computer gaming geeks who grew up on The Next Generation, Voyager and Deep Space Nine.

Chances are you'll be waiting a little while longer for these sorts of games to escape the hardcore gamer ghetto. It's a pity, though. There's a lot of potential there.

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